Bulldogs coach Dean Pay the man to help Canterbury recover from scandal
Dean Pay was a no nonsense players who was as tough as they come. Now the Canterbury Bulldogs coach must be tough on his players.
NRL
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There was never any quit in him when he played and now that he is coaching Dean Pay sees no reason there ever should be a change.
All anybody needs to do to know anything about Pay is to go back to a rainy night in Newcastle when he was a young man with a little talent and he was playing for Country against City and the headlines heading into the game were all about others.
Pay went out that night and started creasing the City forwards. It was one of those uncomfortable nights for football when the rain came down and made the ground just wet enough to take the subtly out of play, meaning players had to run a little more square that night, which was a kind of music for Dean Pay.
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He kept lining up the City forwards and kept hitting them up under the ribs and it soon became apparent the more tender they got the more they wanted no part of him, which didn’t really matter to Pay because he kept on hitting them anyway.
He gave NSW coach Phil Gould no choice but to pick him for the Blues.
And then he did it again, in the Origin series, where they talk a lot about character and what it shows of a man. He found the Queensland forwards early and made it kind of personal against them and by the end of the series they all knew who Dean Pay was as well.
Gould rewrote the narrative for Origin. He borrowed a quote from an American basketball coach, John Wooden, when he said State of Origin football was not character making, as they liked to say, but character revealing.
It was a template that has worked for the Blues ever since.
Pay came through that Origin series and, such was the character revealed, he gave Australian coach Bob Fulton also no choice but to pick him for the Kangaroo tour at the end of the season.
So what option does Pay have now when he takes over as head coach of a football club trying to fight its way out of the unfamiliar position of being easybeats and two young men do everything that goes again him as a man.
Forget about strict definitions of law, as some have tried to argue, that Corey Harawira-Naera and Jayden Okunbor did nothing wrong when they had sex with two schoolgirls because the girls were of legal age.
Everyone within a football club, within a good football club anyway, knows it was wrong.
And Pay, who knows that everything about the way back for Canterbury begins with character, knows it was wrong.
Much will happen this week at Canterbury.
It has already been said that Okunbor will be sacked but Harawira-Naera will just survive, which some suggested with a wink might be because he is the better of the two players. He is close to the Bulldogs’ best forward.
But Harawira-Naera is gone too. He will be sacked this week, along with Okunbor.
What remains beyond that is formalities.
The two players have until Tuesday to respond to show cause notices.
The Bulldogs and the NRL will then consider their response. Then there will be legal threats and argument. The club is hoping it can be finalised by Thursday’s game against North Queensland.
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Chief executive Andrew Hill has then got to back Pay’s decision publicly.
And then the Bulldogs board, chaired by Lynne Anderson, must back Hill and Pay. The NRL has already indicated it will support the Bulldogs and neither player will be registered at another club.
This is a crucial time for Canterbury.
They can hardly afford to lose two quality players, in terms of talent. But if the Bulldogs are ever to get where they want to be then they must be sacked.
In that way they are lucky to have a man like Pay as head coach. Pay’s moral compass is strong. His character, revealed so many years ago, is tough and honest and committed.
Nowadays they call character culture.
Every club in the NRL claims to have good culture. Some clubs are always talking about it, which could suggest they are still looking for it.
Culture is the most overused and misunderstood word in sport.
The best it can be defined is that culture is simply the standards of behaviour you are willing to accept.
How then, can Canterbury get strong as a club if it is prepared to accept players seemingly using school visits as pick up joints?
It is a question Pay and his coaching staff will have to address at some point, and then sometime after the Bulldogs will have to ask as well.
What made the players think it was okay? They either didn’t have the smarts, or the strength of character, to knock back what was a bad decision.
In an odd way, though, it is not a bad thing right now for the club.
It merely shows the Bulldogs are still on the road to excellence. Pay knows that not every player at the club now will be there if he eventually coaches them to a premiership and two more have just been weeded out.
It is important the Bulldogs understand that as well.
You might have all the talent but true success, the kind of success that endures, begins with the right leaders finding the right people.
Poor characters simply can’t drive long term success.
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The Bulldogs have revealed a little of their character this week.
The club could have ignored what happened and it would have never got out.
It has cost them more than $2 million in sponsorship and caused short term damage to its reputation.
But again, it is a long term positive for the club.
If Pay and Hill had ignored what happened, dismissing it as nothing but an inconvenient moment, the club would have slowly festered from the inside. The players would have a new standard they could now behave to.
How could the club be honest about its ambitions if it was prepared to settle on its standards?
The Bulldogs have benefited by having men of character in key roles.
Nobody saw Pay last week when he first learned of what happened.
He was so angry and so disappointed, so let down, he began to physically shake.
“It’s wrong,” he said. “As weak as piss.”
This, remember, for a coach under pressure.
To lift the Bulldogs from the bottom of the competition he needs all the talent he can assemble. As a coach early in his career, any failings could be career ending. He has much at stake.
But he is the father of three girls.
A man first.
NRL CORONAVIRUS PLAN COULD BE A MASTERSTROKE
Suggestions to relocate all 16 NRL clubs to Townsville to see out the coronavirus are certainly left field but could prove a bonanza for the NRL.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has urged Australians to avoid gatherings and the NRL will come under increasing pressure to either suspend the competition or ban crowds from attending games, as is already happening across Europe.
But apparently the heat in Townsville is too much for coronavirus to survive, the best safeguard yet to quarantining the players.
With the players kept safely in Townsville they could play every game at Townsville’s brand new stadium, which would showcase the game perfectly.
It would be like Magic Round every weekend.
The other great benefit is the unusual opportunity it would provide the game itself.
With sports getting suspending all around the world, broadcasters are running out of content to show.
It nicely opens up an opportunity for the NRL to say to networks around the world that they have this little competition in Australia still playing and they could gladly televise it if they cared to do so.
It has the potential to expose the game to unseen markets.